Star Wars Spectacular Vanity Fair: The Ultimate Photoshoot

Opening May 19, Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith (Twentieth Century Fox) is set on eight different planets, with an entire army of Wookiees, more than 2,300 special effects, and what promises to be the ultimate lightsaber duel. As the final installment in this six-film, 33-year epic heads to theaters, Annie Leibovitz shoots the movie’s on-screen and behind-the-scenes heroes.

Lucas had no way of knowing that the idea he was beginning to scratch out in his cramped handwriting would eventually make him the multi-billionaire head of his own little empire, or that it would occupy him, on and off, for the next 33 years.

With the May 19 release of Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith, he will finally be free of his grand task. This is the sixth—and, he says, final—Star Wars film, the one in which Anakin Skywalker, played by Hayden Christensen, completes his transformation from a wayward Jedi knight to an evil Sith named Darth Vader. As such, he suits up in the famous black armor and helmet, a revised version of which was made for Christensen out of leather and fiberglass. Revenge of the Sith is the movie that will connect the effervescent original Star Wars trilogy of the late 1970s and early 80s to the latter, denser installments.

“It’s the missing link,” Lucas says. “Once it’s there, it’s a complete work, and I’m proud of that. I do see it, tonality-wise, as two trilogies. But they do, together, form one epic of fathers and sons.”

Pre-production work began just a few days after the May 16, 2002, release of the last installment, the melancholy and ambitious Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones. The new movie will have scenes set on eight different planets—including the Skywalker home of Tatooine; the urban, Blade Runner—esque Coruscant, seat of the Jedi; and the lush Naboo, native world of the lovely princess turned senator Padmé Amidala (played by Natalie Portman) as well as the senator turned evil emperor Palpatine (played, with perfectly elocuted gusto, by Ian McDiarmid). There will also be never-before-seen worlds, including grassy Alderaan, the peaceful home of Princess Leia.

Digital cameras started rolling, in blue-screen-lined studios in Australia, on June 30, 2003. Rick McCallum, the film’s producer, took a second unit around the world—China, Thailand, Switzerland, England, Tunisia—to shoot backgrounds that have been digitally tweaked by Lucas’s special-effects craftsmen at Industrial Light & Magic. As early as 2001, when Sicily’s Mount Etna erupted, McCallum and his crew made a special trip to capture the lava-drenched environment necessary for key scenes having to do with Anakin’s fall.

When completed, the new film will comprise some 2,300 separate shots, each of which has at least one special effect—a record number that surpassed the 2,000 effects shots in The Phantom Menace and dwarfs the 1,400 in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

He came up with his first hit, American Graffiti (1973), on a dare from his mentor Francis Ford Coppola to do something funny and conventional.

“It led me on a path 180 degrees from where I was going,” Lucas says. “Somehow, I became really successful at it. But I’m destined to go back the other way.” He laughs. “I’ve earned the right to fail. That’s basically what I’m going to do. I’ve got enough of a fund set aside for my old age. From now on, I’m going to make movies like THX that nobody wants to see, that aren’t successful, and everybody will say I’ve lost my touch. I mean, I love doing Star Wars, and it’s a fun adventure for me, but I’m ready to explore some of the things I was interested in exploring when I was in my late 20s.”

He merely “understood what people liked to go see.” Further, in talking up his planned return to experimental film, he strikes the tone of a man ready to do penance for years spent in the wild. But in a more defiant mood later on during our interview, he sounds convinced that what he has put up on screen isn’t merely kid stuff, and suggests that it should be classified as enduring popular art. In the same breath that has him mentioning Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci as pop artists of their day, he says, “The interesting thing about Star Wars—and I didn’t ever really push this very far, because it’s not really that important—but there’s a lot going on there that most people haven’t come to grips with yet. But when they do, they will find it’s a much more intricately made clock than most people would imagine.”

Lucas expanded on the notion of Anakin’s divine origin. (Warning: The following may or may not be helpful to the uninitiated.) “It was a virgin birth in an ecosystem of symbiotic relationships. It means that between the Force, which is sort of a life force, and reality, the connectors between these two things are what we call mitichlorians. They’re kind of based on mitochondria, which are a completely different species, a different animal, that live inside every single cell and allow it to live, allow it to reproduce, allow life to exist. They also, in their own way, communicate with the Force itself. The more you have, the more your cells are able to speak intuitively to the Force itself and use the powers of the Force. Ultimately, I would say the Force itself created Anakin. I don’t want to get into specific terms of labeling things to make it one religion or another, but, basically, that’s one of the foundations of the hero’s journey.”

Lucas has scattered a lot of his own autobiography throughout the series.
Anakin Skywalker, a slave boy on Tatooine played by child actor Jake Lloyd in The Phantom Menace, builds his own Podracer in his spare time—just as the mechanically inclined Lucas himself, in his teenage years, souped up his own two-cylinder Fiat Bianchina.
In Attack of the Clones, Anakin’s sweet and accommodating mother is taken hostage and abused by the vicious, nomadic, desert-dwelling Tusken Raiders. Anakin reaches her when she’s on the verge of death—perhaps an echo of Lucas’s childhood, during which his mother, Dorothy, was often bedridden with a mysterious illness (probably pancreatitis, reports Lucas biographer Dale Pollock).
In the original trilogy, Luke Skywalker is ordered by his foster father, Uncle Owen Lars, to stay home and work in the family business (moisture farming), just as Lucas’s own father, George Lucas Sr., a strict small-town businessman who called Hollywood “Sin City,” scoffed at his son’s desire to attend film school and wanted young George to join him so that together they could rule Modesto’s office-supplies business. Both Luke and Anakin suffer horrible injuries, as Lucas himself did in 1962, when he was nearly killed in a car crash that flipped his Fiat “four or five times” and ended his dream of becoming a professional racecar driver, writes Pollock in Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas.
“I put parts of myself in all of it, same as I did in American Graffiti, whether it’s Anakin Skywalker or Luke Skywalker,” Lucas says. “I kind of want to be Han Solo, but that’s not as much me as the Skywalkers are.”

In the next movie, at least, Anakin will attain true villain status, which will give Christensen the chance to turn in a more easily accepted, love-to-hate-him performance. Lucas cryptically suggests that Anakin’s grief over his mother (or perhaps over someone else close to him who ends up dead) is what will drive him into the embrace of the Jedi’s enemies, the Siths. Lucas hints strongly that the fiery, lava-spewing place guarded by spiderlike androids in the Revenge of the Sith trailer released last fall is hell itself.

Lucas says, “you basically get somebody who’s going to make a pact with the Devil, and it’s going to be a pact with the Devil that says, ‘I want the power to save somebody from death. I want to be able to stop them from going to the river Styx, and I need to go to a god for that, but the gods won’t do it, so I’m going to go down to Hades and get the Dark Lord to allow me to have this power that will allow me to save the very person I want to hang on to.’
You know, it’s Faust. So Anakin wants that power, and that is basically a bad thing. If you’re going to sell your soul to save somebody you love, that’s not a good thing. That’s, as we say in the film, unnatural. You have to accept the natural course of life. Of all things. Death is obviously the biggest of them all. Not only death for yourself but death for the things you care about.”

The Darth Vader costume is not just a black shell meant to look scary—it’s a life-support system made necessary by the near-fatal injuries Anakin has suffered. Although the duel doesn’t end in a knockout victory for Obi-Wan (who is slain by Vader in A New Hope), it has positive repercussions in the galaxy first dreamed up by Lucas three decades ago.

“Anakin, as Skywalker, as a human being, was going to be extremely powerful,” he says. “But he ended up losing his arms and a leg and became partly a robot. So a lot of his ability to use the Force, a lot of his powers, are curbed at this point, because, as a living form, there’s not that much of him left. So his ability to be twice as good as the Emperor disappeared, and now he’s maybe 20 percent less than the Emperor. So that isn’t what the Emperor had in mind. He wanted this really super guy, but that got derailed by Obi-Wan. So he finds that, with Luke, he can get a more primo version if he can turn Luke to the Dark Side. You’ll see, as this goes on, Luke is faced with the same issues and practically the same scenes that Anakin is faced with."

“You learn that Darth Vader isn’t this monster,” Lucas says. “He’s a pathetic individual who made a pact with the Devil and lost. And he’s trapped. He’s a sad, pathetic character, not an evil big monster. I mean, he’s a monster in that he’s turned to the Dark Side and he’s serving a bad master and he’s into power and he’s lost a lot of his humanity. In that way, he’s a monster, but beneath that, as Luke says in Return of the Jedi, early on, ‘I know there’s still good in you. There’s good in you, I can sense it.’ Only through the love of his children and the compassion of his children, who believe in him, even though he’s a monster, does he redeem himself.”

The six Star Wars movies form the biography of Darth Vader—something Lucas claims he wasn’t consciously aware of “until 1998.” It’s strange to think that this filmmaker with a popcorn reputation has spent 33 years telling the story of a failed, pathetic monster who isn’t redeemed until his last few breaths.

 Box office statistics would seem to belie Lucas's claim of being at heart, part of the avant-garde.

The Iron Man.

Oh, my! Good heavens! It's Anthony Daniels!

Playing the droid C-3PO has been a "humbling" and sometimes "isolating" experience, according to the actor, who says that, when he's in costume, cast and crew sometimes forget there's a human being under all that metal, treatring "him" as "it."

Daniels is proud of his long association with Star Wars. I'm the only actor to be in all the films," he points out.